ambivalence about fortran (was Re: numpy & non-Apple gcc?)

[Takeshi Enomoto]

Hi,

A few years ago sci port maintainers agreed to use gcc43 (now gcc44)
as defaut.
I prefer g95 but I accepted it since gfortran is a majority
has more features (cray pointers, OpenMP) and has become as reliable as g95.

There is a drawback.
It takes hours to build gcc4x to obtain gfortran.
g95 requires less since it only builds c and fortran.
Once gcc4x is installed it keeps rebuilding upon revision or version updates.

gcc4x could be built quickly if fortran, java, and objc were variants
or they were separate ports.

I need fortran at work and I like it but it is a problem for sci apps in MacPorts.
It is better to avoid fortran as a default if possible when writing a port.
Recently I try to make fortran as variant
if fortran is required to build a fortran interface (eg. plplot, grib_api).

ATLAS also needs a long time.
I am asking the maintainer of octave to add no_atlas variant.
<http://trac.macports.org/ticket/21797>
It has been a reasonable choice to use atlas
since there is a problem linking to some functions in Apple's accelerate.
This was especially true with g95.
I came up with a solution posted in the url above.

Takeshi